Your FOMO Is Holding You Back And Preventing Success

“The reverse schadenfreude of FOMO (the pain we may feel from others having good fortune) and the insatiable yet unreachable need for everything to be fine, conspire to make us distracted, unhappy, and most of all, somewhere else.”

Seth Godin (American Author, Tribes)

“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the 100 other good ideas that there are.”

Steve Jobs (American Entrepreneur)

“One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself.

Leonardo Da Vinci (Renaissance Artist, Inventor, Mathematician)

Being a successful leader means learning to say “no” and learning to quit after saying “yes”.

FOMO is just a “keeping up with the Jones’” mentality, with social media as its accelerant.

FOMO makes you say “yes” when you should say “no”.

Welcome to the herd, little sheep.

This unconscious assimilation is easier than the pain of saying “no” and missing out on some fantasy of a collective experience.

It’s easier than the discomfort of being the outlier.

FOMO is not only about what you think you’re missing out on, it often connects with worrying about what other people think of you if you don’t join in.

And then, it locks you in for the long haul.

A trend report published by JW Intelligence in the Harvard Business Review showed that up to 70% of adults experience FOMO.

The combination of insecurity and envy that FOMO creates incites a compulsion to say “yes” to everything.

And anxiety at the thought of saying “no”.

Another report commissioned by Citizen Relations found that the main areas of FOMO are travel (59%), parties and events (56%), and food (29%) — and the main driver is social media comparisons (primarily Facebook).

The impacts, according to this study, include feelings of envy (39%), jealousy (30%), and sadness or disappointment (21%).

The emotional pain drives a “yes” when you really should say “no” to the focus traps FOMO promotes.

FOMO infects business decisions as well.

Successful leaders, who naturally want to say “yes” to every good idea, also face the challenge to say “no” — even to good ideas.

According to an article in Training Journal, “The biggest challenge facing leaders… is saying no to a lot of good ideas. It may even mean rejecting some great ideas — something that’s counterintuitive for a leader and hard to accept. However, all the evidence shows that nothing is a bigger destroyer of focus than always saying yes.”

It may seem equally counterintuitive to quit once you’ve already said “yes”.

But continuing on in a direction that is the wrong one, just because you’ve committed to it, is just as disastrous.

Many people fall into the trap of “sunk cost fallacy” — where they persist in the wrong direction because they’ve already invested so much into it.

Kellogg Institutediscusses sunk cost fallacy as a cognitive bias where people will justify their continuation with a commitment that no longer serves them because of the time, energy, and money already invested and not wanting to call out that investment as a waste.

This resistance to quit, even when all indicators say you should, is a recipe for regret, as perseverance alone will not salvage a bad project (or relationship, for that matter).

Whatever you have committed to, you get to re-evaluate on a continuous basis to see how it’s either moving you to or from your goals.

At any time, you can (and should) pull the plug on anything you’ve said “yes” to that isn’t working out and not look back.

Being a successful leader means learning to say “no” and learning to quit after saying “yes”. Leaders learn how to be selective in saying “yes” only to things that support or further their goals. Reconnect with your top priorities and your overall purpose. Set boundaries and don’t let FOMO distract you. Be selectively accountable to your commitments and don’t be afraid to pull the plug on anything that doesn’t serve what you need for your future. Saying “no” now can protect you from regret and wasting time later.

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